


Screwdrivers

by Odamaki



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Normal is difficult, Post-Canon, Post-War, Pre-Slash If You Squint, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:47:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23285740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Odamaki/pseuds/Odamaki
Summary: Living with Heero Yuy is not at all like fighting with him, Duo is coming to realise. Especially not when they're both struggling to be normal.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Screwdrivers

_AN: This was written a solid decade ago, around Christmas 2010. It's rather curious to me to see some of the same ideas in this story resurface I'm writing in another fic (not yet posted!). This has been edited to iron out some of the very, very wonky tense changes and fix grammar._

_____________________

Living with Heero Yuy is not at all like fighting with him, Duo is coming to realise. Especially not when they're both struggling to be normal.

  
“This is bullshit!” Duo had shouted when Relena had announced she’d found them a place at a private college, “We’re more qualified than anyone already. Why the hell do I need a qualification all of a sudden? And why aren’t the rest going?”

  
She’d pointed out that they may be qualified in the best of senses, but that they were also virtually certifiable.

“You’ve done a lot for peace,” Quatre had said when he’d eventually talked Duo down from his rage, “But you’ve also done a lot…else. Trowa and I have family. We have legal and set work we’ve bound ourselves to for the next few years. The ministers are scared you’ll vanish off into the underworld again. Face it; you’re an inspiration to rebels on both sides of the equation, and would a little stability be a bad thing? It’s not just you, Wufei will be there too”

  
Only Wufei had always walked by himself, which left Duo to deal with Heero’s idiosyncratic routines alone.

____

“Are you using this?”

Duo looks up from his lap where he’s been re-jigging an old RC car to see Heero brandishing a library book.

“Huh? No, knock yourself out.”

Heero doesn't budge. “You haven’t finished your homework.”

  
“I’ll do it later, just take it. It’s fine.”

“I don’t want to be half-way through mine when you want it back,” Heero explains. Duo bites back a grunt of exasperation.

“I won’t. I’ll do it in the morning or something. Seriously, just take it.”

  
“You won’t have time in the morning. Did you forget basketball practice starts tomorrow?”

  
Duo had forgotten and it irks him massively that Heero knows his schedule better than he does. Everything about Heero irks him these days. He’d come back yesterday to find all his pencils sharpened and arranged in order of lead softness. It's infuriating. Heero finishes his work early, gets bored and irons things. It pisses Duo off; people like Heero have no right to be pressing his socks and carefully reading cookbooks or learning how to cultivate houseplants.

He knows it's Heero’s odd way of coping with things; distracting himself from the memories and trying to fit in with whatever weird idea of domesticity he's contrived, but the forced falseness of it make Duo’s skin crawl.

  
“Alright, whatever, I’ll do it after you finish.”

“I may be a while,” Heero warns him, “I like to be thorough.” It's true. Heero would probably sit and skim-read the damn thing from cover to cover before starting his essay.

  
“Take your time,” Duo snaps, knowing full well he can throw a passable essay together at the last minute if he has to.

  
Heero observes him with an excruciating lack of blinking. “Your grade will be bad.”

Duo throws down the car. “So what!? What's it to you? Why do you care? We’re not here to get grades, for fuck’s sake- it’s rehab. You get it? We’re here for nothing more than to pretend to be good little boys living out dumb, normal lives. Skipping homework’s part of that.”

  
“I’m perfectly aware of why we’re here,” Heero says, setting the book on the desk, “But there’s no reason to be sloppy. Good grades will only provide more weight to our case.”

  
“And yours are impeccable, I KNOW. Sorry if I’m messing up your perfect cardboard-cutout life.” Duo shoves his feet into his sneakers, and shoves his wallet into his pocket. “You know what, screw you, Yuy. Reality says nobody cares if you get a perfect score in English translation. People like me? I have friends. So I may be scraping by on the academic record, but I’m a fucking success compared to you. You’re failing social skills 101.”

And so saying, he hadn't slammed the door, but he'd sure given it a jaunty slap to shut it behind him. 

______

  
That had been two days ago.

  
Heero has been contriving to avoid him, Duo figures, which is probably fair enough. Only now he feels bad about it. It isn’t exactly Heero’s fault he's messed up, afterall. And after 48 hours, the bad feeling resolves itself into an intention to apologise, so that when Duo arrives back to the dorm-room and finds Heero there for once, he scrambles for the words to say it. Before he can; however, he notices a package on his desk.

“What’s this? I didn't order anything.”

  
Heero regards him out the corner of an eye. “A conclusion,” he says, cryptically.

Duo eyes the package. It doesn’t look rigged to explode. It doesn't smell like gelite, and anyway, Heero's not stupid enough to get himself blown up as collateral. Isn't he? Duo carefully tears it open and discovers that, after all, it holds nothing more than a screwdriver.

“That’s it? What, what’s that supposed to mean?”

  
He picks it up and waves it in annoyance at Heero, who has swivelled on his chair to face him. “The hell is this? You trying to say I’m, what? A tool? I should go screw myself? I need a screw? Screw you, Yuy.”

  
“It is me,” Heero says, simply. Duo boggles at him.

  
“Now you lost me.”

  
Heero leans back in his chair, palms resting on his lap. “You’re right. I’m bad at this. I am blunt and literal and plenty of people don’t know how to handle me correctly. I can construct the sum of small parts to build something as huge and complicated as a new political world, but my interactions in it are limited and basic. I can fix almost everything, but I cannot fix myself. I need a purpose, and I need some force or hand to put me to that purpose. Without it, without anything to build or anything to fix, then I’m at a loss.”

  
“Right,” Duo says softly, the screwdriver light in his hand. It's the most personal speech Heero has ever divulged in front of him. Duo licks his lips, and looks at the screwdriver. It's a bit of metal with a flat end and a plastic handle; relatively cheap to make. What do you do with it when it’s discarded?

“Just, just so I’m clear, is this you apologising for being an inflexible dick recently?”

  
A faint smile twitches at the corners of Heero’s mouth. “Yes.”

Duo exhales slowly. He supposes he’d been pretty unfair to Heero really. They’d both come here with no one, but Duo at least knows how to merge with people and their social groups. He hadn’t even thought that Heero should maybe be one of them. He wonderes, asides from the oppressive control Heero has been exercising over the tiny circle of the campus he does occupy, what the other boy has been thinking. Duo had guessed that the ironing has been a way of coping with the inaction that peace has bought, but he hadn’t realised that it, and the nagging, had been a desperate attempt to plug a deeper void.

  
“Shit, Yuy, you can’t…use me as a project. You can’t fix me. That’s something I’ve got to do for myself.”

  
“I know.”

“And… I don’t know if I can help give you more life purpose.”

There is a beat of hesitation. “I know,” Heero repeats, and an unspoken question hangs in the air. Duo, as he often does, grasps at straws of humor.

  
“And I’m pretty sure anything concerning you, me and screwing right here and now is jumping about a million steps too far.”

Heero snorted. It might even have been a sign of amusement. Duo gave a wonky grin.

  
“But if you promise to just tell me when you’re getting all purposeless and antsy instead of being a creeper and reorganising my stuff, I’ll…be more of a friend.”

  
“Friends?” Heero sits, contemplating. It's obvious he's trying to parse how that kind of relationship functions. Duo opens his mouth to try and clarify it for him, when Heero speaks again.

  
“Duo, I am bored,” he says, as though reading from an internal cue-card, “Would you like to go out somewhere?” He pauses as Duo bursts out laughing and then, with something verging on a real smile adds, “But don’t bring the screwdriver. That would just be weird.”


End file.
